We have several servers which we are responsibile for. Two of them are production, and four others are test bed servers. I’m on the team responsible for the Server Boxes, and OS (Win 2003). Another team works on the applications, which include MS SQL, and Oracle.
Okay, the test bed servers are used for testing various patches, configurations, application settings, etc.
Anyway, from time to time (once every month or two) we are called upon to either rebuild the box or to do a restore from our daily and weekly backups.
What the Application team is wanting to do, is to have the ability to restore a server to a particular date or state, usually within the past week or two.
At the moment to do this we may do a quick OS install and then push a backup to the box to bring it to the state that the developers want.
Problem this takes time and the developers team want to find a way to do this faster. One suggestion was to use Ghost. but the problem with this is that it does not support RAID5
So what suggestions or solutions are being used and why would you recommend it? We want something to be fast and not Tooooo expensive. Space to store images, or backups are not a problem. Symantec Volume Manager has been eliminated. Are there any other suggestions?